You’d be surprised how much time one might devote to the tweaking of one’s backend… particularly when it doesn’t make a scrap of difference to the end user. Pages are now 98% static, and don’t rely on mod_rewrite to turn a jumble of PHP includes into an actual website. Dropping most of the PHP means Unicode characters can actually be used now, and dropping mod_rewrite means I can finally use trackbacks. Remarkable, the workflow that binds our expression.

In the transition, I replaced all the numeric entities in my archives with their proper Unicode counterparts. The results are… interesting. Wait, no. The other one. Tedious.

1 instance of a &#162; being converted to a ¢

10 instances of a &#215; being converted to an ×

3 instances of a &#224; being converted to an à

1 instance of a &#232; being converted to an è

25 instances of a &#233; being converted to an é

1 instance of a &#235; being converted to an ë

2 instances of a &#241; being converted to an ñ

1 instance of a &#243; being converted to an ó

1 instance of a &#246; being converted to an ö

3 instances of a &#252; being converted to a ü

1253 instances of a &#8211; being converted to a –

210 instances of a &#8212; being converted to a —

291 instances of a &#8216; being converted to a ‘

4067 instances of a &#8217; being converted to a ’

568 instances of a &#8220; being converted to a “

574 instances of a &#8221; being converted to a ”

706 instances of a &#8230; being converted to a …

6 instances of a &#8482; being converted to a ™, and

5 instances of a &#8594; being converted to a →

Seven hundred ellipses. Four thousand apostrophes. My god. The fact that the number of opening and closing double–quotes doesn’t match is a little disturbing. Did I just forget that I’d started to put something in quotes? Maybe they were just half–hearted air–quotes. We’ll never know.

A quick checkup on the lonely ‘ö’ in the list tells use that Sascha Höhne has changed RAD.E8’s logo back to the good one, and has converted his previously–100%–flash portfolio into a crisp, clean, valid XHTML/CSS website. I couldn’t be more pleased.